Pumped on a major artery

I did it!!! I did it!!! I did it!!!

And now I'll tell you how...

Saturday night I was graciously ferried downtown by my father, to spend the night in residence with my fellow riders, and be that much closer to the start line. Despite our best intentions of getting a good night's sleep, we couldn't help staying up, going out for food (carbo loading!) and chatting until well past midnight, which gave us a grand total of about 4 1/2 hours of sleep. Early mornings are ungodly, I tell you - when the alarm went off at 5:30am, I thought I would be done before I even started!

Adrenaline, however, is a beautiful thing - as is good friendship and good weather, both of which were abundant that Sunday morning. We rode down to the starting line in high spirits and at high speeds, just barely making the cutoff time before they closed the chutes for our course! We got there, though, and onto the highway we rode.

Our group of five ended up splitting by bike type before long - two people on road bikes who finished in 3 1/2 hours, and three of us including myself on mountain bikes who chugged into the finish an hour later - I find it amusing, by the way, that we spent the same amount of time riding the course as we did sleeping the night before! All told, we took only three brief rests - bananas and porta-potties were a must - and had a fantastic time through and through! The highway was quite hilly, so we worked hard on those uphills, but man were we ever repayed when we got to speed downhill at 60km/h without a vehicle in sight! Honestly - cars should be banned from highways. I would ride my bike on the DVP every frickin' day.

After we had loaded up on as much free food as possible, and had our picture taken with the Ride for Heart mascot - you guessed it (or did you?): a giant heart! - we biked back to rez, bringing our total distance to about 90km for the day. Not bad, not bad. Still ravenous, I devoured a huge all-day breakfast ( I never finish those!!) and then collapsed on my friend's bed for not one, but TWO successive naps. Then I was driven home where I proceeded to sleep for another 11 hours.

I'm still a little sleepy :) But, amazingly, I'm not sore! My butt might not fancy sitting on a bike seat for a day or two, but my muscles themselves feel like a million bucks. As do I :)

Mission: accomplished. And now, it's time to train for that 5k! I love biking, I really do - but never fear, everyone, I still am and always will be Liv to run :)